A team from the Laurentian University Mine Rescue (LUMR) club recently won the 2017 Mine Emergency Response Development (MERD) competition hosted by the Colorado School of Mines in Denver. I sat down with Julien Lalande (team captain), Greg Moser (club president), and their staff adviser, Ethan Armit, to talk about the team’s history and recent successes. Continue reading →

It has been said that “a good plan is like a road map; it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there.”[1] Of course, we all know what it is like when we try to get things done without a plan. Perhaps we have done poorly on a school project that was left to the last minute. Or we have endured disorganized meetings that were a waste of everyone’s time. Or maybe we’ve been forced to make an “emergency” purchase that could have been avoided with a little forethought. We understand the important of good planning, if only because we know the consequences of proceeding without it. Continue reading →

We live in an age of metrics. We wear devices to measure our steps, heart rate, and blood pressure. Our social media engagement is discretized into hits, and clicks, and “likes”. Even academic productivity is judged by numbers: publications, citations, impact factors, h-indices. It is not surprising then that instructors would also want to gather data on their students. Continue reading →